These are some scattered thoughts about generative AI. The images were generated by the now inaccessible DALL·E 2 model in 2023. They are unmodified and uncompressed and are available to use and modify in projects with optional credit. By someone's estimate, I consumed about 3kWh in total while using DALL·E 2.
"AI" image generation could be categorized as something similar to other generative techniques and algorithms from the past 40 years, but injected with a simulation of subjectivity. That's not quite right though. The inhuman strain behind this subjectivity shows in ways that become the characteristics of each model. The stupid data centers and strange human labor stain every indication that what you are seeing or reading is in fact what you asked for. A sprawling, unwanted, busted subjectivity. If it is an algorithm, it exceeds the limit of anything that could be considered "solid state."
"My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.
"He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality." -chris marker, sans soleil
A solid-state algorithm is as reliable as an oiled gear, bound only by time. It is an oiled gear. Yamaneko's 1980s circuit-images surprise because you can fit every component into your field of vision. If it is a black box, you could at least install it in a van.
It's not "my kid could do that." it's "any arrangement of pixels on a monitor is relatively arbitrary."
Someone described the 12-tone music of Schoenberg as "finishing up" a project that had started in the enlightenment. That is, filling out the possiblilty space of classically scored compositon. The old world is dead, so make anatomy book out of it, if you can stand it.
It's the feeling upon learning that a Giclee print is a fancy inkjet. oh well that's not printmaking is it? Then you learn how annoying printers are and maybe it becomes printmaking. If there's a craft, the tools shift and morph under your feet, lasting only months at a time, so the only survivors of this craft are those with permanent start-up drop-ship brain; or perhaps those whose relationship to technology has always been fleeting and squishy. The bongwater of midjourney is a vast sea.
You learned about craft bookmaking and wrote the whole thing off when every book so easily categorized itself as a fetish object, content-less. Then you gained the fetish for tools, varieties of glue, bone folders etc. A need is felt to aquire tools in the way some people have a lot to say about authentic bomber jackets.
I'm jealous of those who could make marbled paper for the rest of their lives, permuting the techniques to permute the results. The particularities only known to craftspeople can keep you alive indefinitely.
I need that dither. I need that gradient. The mechanics of it matter. I'm a technician. I can tell. I refuse to train a model that I know will piss me off. I refuse to tame a statistical monster.
I didn't appreciate DALL·E 2 until I learned that it had been canned. What a success for the medium! A model with desirable characteristics, flushed in favor of incorporating the unbelievably-useless 3rd iteration, now only accessible from a monetized chat bot. The images produced by DALL·E 2, now free of its task, have gained a lightness. Knowing that the machinery that produced them has been cannibalized gives them a newly minted aura.
